Tim Grobaty: Checking the facts in our 'permanent record'

OUR LIFE, OFF THE RECORD: You remember, we're hoping, that the whole time you were growing up, your teachers talked about your "record." How it would follow you around your whole life and would be consulted by administrators and interviewers as you blundered through life.

We always imagined our record would be something like Santa's or St. Peter's records - utterly omniscient and embarrassingly complete.

We further imagined that one day we would be sitting on the applicant side of a job recruiter's desk as he asked us to explain our infatuation with Helene Moore's pigtails.

"Did you, in fact, yank on Helene Moore's pigtails?" the suit would ask.

"No," we would reply, thinking that would be the answer that would best get us the job.

"It says here you did," the manager would say, peering over his readers at a copy of our record.

"I might have, once. She was in my third-grade class. It was a long time ago."

Your record was supposed to be secret, and you were never allowed to even get a quick peek at it. And yet, a few years ago a woman who worked in, or had access to, the office at St. Joseph Elementary School, where we were taught from 1961 to 1969, sent us a copy of our record, no doubt at some peril.

At the time, we stuck it in the middle of our family Bible (roughly at Ezekiel, if you're looking for some sort of Kabbalistic significance - and some day we'll tell you about our family Bible. It's a saga both intriguing and sophomoric in a Dan Brown sort of way) and forgot about it.

Then, a few days ago we were assailed for being an utter buffoon by some people who bristled at the idea of our taking public office who suggested we were less than intellectually up to the chore of filling potholes and throwing the occasional kiddie party at the park. The word "buffoon" stuck in our mind.

To shore up our shattered ego, we went back to our record to see what our IQ is. We're not here to brag about IQs because there are few things more tiresome than listening to Mensa members yabber about their Kuhlmann-Anderson scores (although our scores, we should say, in the interest of transparency, are Shakespearean; only our parents' desire to have us grow up with commoners in our age bracket so that we would know their primitive ways and customs prevented us from being swept up to Stanford University when we were 10, upon which occasion scientists and educators were to have sat at our feet like the elders in the temple).

The shining promise of our ionospheric IQ wasn't upheld at all by our grades, according to our record. We discovered that in the second grade, we actually got an A in arithmetic, a feat that would never be equaled by us in our lifetime. In most other classes (Religion, Reading, English, Civics) we had As and Bs with various pluses and minuses.

Except in writing. Our detractors will revel and bray like mules in the fact that our worst grades in elementary school were in Writing. We scored solid Bs from first through fourth grades, then we dipped down into all Cs for the balance of our time at St. Joseph.

We have to wonder if the sisters at St. Joseph were just blowing smoke about the record following us throughout life, or if our current employers simply didn't care about abysmal - or average, anyway - writing skills.

A further revelation is the fact that the record doesn't contain an itemized list of all our wrongdoings committed throughout our felonious elementary years. Nothing in there about wolf-whistling at a poster of the Blessed Virgin Mary, nada about us and and our friend Patrick singing Tantum Ergo in the manner of Three Dog Night channeling Otis Redding in "Try a Little Tenderness." And it was mum altogether about any pullings of pigtails.

Of course, all of that could be extrapolated from our conduct grades, we suppose, and it is probably the reason our boss wasn't surprised when we did stuff at work like getting caught in an elevator because we pried the doors open between floors or getting into a beef with another reporter and cutting the cord to his phone and throwing it out the window while he was in the middle of an interview or losing a company car or setting off a mass evacuation of our building when we set off a fire alarm with a carton of Girl Scout cookies.

Of course, there's more in our record: Our dad, it says, was in the tuxedo business. Our stepmom, it says, was a housewife, which was a wild exaggeration.

It says when we received the sacraments, and it says that our conniving parents intended all along for us to attend St. John Bosco, which was our own little Vietnam.

But, in all, nothing there that could be used in some sort of extortion or blackmailing deal by, say, our androgynously named opponent in our suspended race for 5th District.

Now, if only we could get the record of our high school years.

If we can't, we're doomed. We won't go into detail, but it's not the kind of stuff you put in the family Bible.